


letters he cannot read

by youheldyourbreath



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post 8x06, actions have consequences kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 07:24:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18912277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youheldyourbreath/pseuds/youheldyourbreath
Summary: Gendry pours over the tiny slip of parchment again and again. His fingers trace the letters he cannot read. He has the four short sentences memorized. He does not need to know how to read to feel the dread that the words seep into his bones.





	letters he cannot read

**Author's Note:**

> Arya and Gendry survived. So now we get to live in fanfiction and ALL THE DIFFERENT WAYS they get to be together and not dead. Not bad for a "crack ship", huh, reddit???

_King’s Landing has fallen. Dragon Queen burned it down. Men, women and children are dead. It is bad._

_Davos_

Gendry pours over the tiny slip of parchment again and again. His fingers trace the letters he cannot read. He has the four short sentences memorized. He does not need to know how to read to feel the dread that the words seep into his bones.

Arya was in King’s Landing. There is no mention of her in the four sentences. No matter how many times he tries to read between the lines, he does not find her there. She is a ghost.

He walks helplessly up and down the long corridors of Winterfell. In the days after she had left him, had gone South ahead of the Northern forces, he had thrown himself into the forge. He wanted to help rebuild her childhood home. It had not been a bad place to grow up, he noticed before the Long Night, and, if Lord Gendry Baratheon had anything to say about it, it would not be a bad place to raise the next generation of her kin.

He does not work in the forge now.

No, all he does is walk and wander and run his calloused fingertips along the letters he cannot read.

* * *

He hears a rumor. He hears a rumor that Jon Snow killed the Dragon Queen. He hears a rumor that the Unsullied and the Dothraki have taken King’s Landing. Gendry closes his eyes and breathes. His city has suffered enough.

He hears all kinds of rumors about Jon and the big, black dragon that flew away with its mother in its claws. He hears the Northmen that traveled South with Jon threaten violence should their Lord be executed for his crimes. He hears a band of wolves from the Riverlands have joined the Northmen at the gates of King’s Landing, prowling for blood of those that would seek to harm their family.

He hears no rumors about Arya.

She is a ghost. She is everywhere, and nowhere all at once.

* * *

He travels South. He has nothing to offer the North now. He does not work the forges and he does not contribute to their rebuilding efforts. He paces and worries and his fingerprints ruin the words on the parchment he carries with him at all times.

He goes to Storm’s End and the lesser Lord installed there does not put up a fight when he arrives with a small group of men to retake his family seat. He has the Baratheon look, the smallfolk shout. He is the Smith of the Long Night. He armed the realms of men to fight death and won.

There is no contest.

He is Lord Gendry Baratheon now and forever. The Dragon Queen is dead. Her words echo into eternity. “I think you should be the Lord of Storm’s End.” And so, he is.

* * *

He receives another scrap of parchment four weeks after King’s Landing has fallen. He still cannot read the words. He cannot even make out a single letter. It is read aloud to him and he nearly collapses with relief.

_Lord Gendry Baratheon,_

_Lord Tyrion Lannister and Jon will be released to a council of Lords and Ladies outside the Capital in three weeks’ time. The Unsullied have agreed to oversee a trial in exchange for calling off my soldiers and wolves from the North. I request your presence._

_My brother’s life may very well depend on your vote. Please help me save him._

_Arya Stark_

* * *

The journey to King’s Landing is impossibly difficult. The Baratheon bannermen are weary of traveling to a city overrun by foreign conquerors. The arguing and in-fighting slows them down.

Gendry Baratheon does not know how to be a Lord. He lets his men bicker. Until they are three days outside of King’s Landing and Gendry’s nerves are split. He slams his fist down on the rickety wooden table at the inn they have made home for a night and the force reverberates in the room. All the men surrounding him silence.

He does not know how to be a Lord. He is a smith by trade, and a fighter by nature, but there is a fury in him that is unmatched in any man. This war has gone on too long. He has fought the dead, lost Arya and, if he does not succeed in King’s Landing, he will lose Jon, too. He does not care what these little Lordlings fear. He knows the Unsullied. He knows the Dothraki. He fought side-by-side them in Winterfell.

If fortune has fashioned him to fight them on the battlefield, this time as foes, he will do it, too. The bickering is maddening.

“Enough,” he roars. “Lord Swann, should you and Lord Thorne continue to argue like a pair of children, I will have you switched like ‘em as well.” He massages the crinkle between his eyes and plods forward, “We have been called to the Capital. We will go to the Capital. I’m not gonna hear any more about it.”

“My Lord,” the envoy from House Blount squeaks.

“Not another word,” Gendry says with ferocious finality. He yanks himself from his seat and storms out of the inn. When he is outside, he tilts his head up and exhales. He does not want to be a Lord.

The smallfolk call him the Forge of the Living.

He reaches for the small, rolled up parchment in his satchel and runs his fingers along the letters he cannot read.

It is enough to know they belong to her.

* * *

He does not know the burned streets. He does not know the blown to bits alleyways. He does not know the rubble that might have been the tavern his mother worked in when he was a boy. He does not know King’s Landing as it stands.

He does not recognize the Street of Steel. He cannot tell apart the ruins of what-might-be his old forge. He does not know his city.

He was a bastard from Flea Bottom long before he was Lord Gendry Baratheon.

His city burned while he worked in a forge hundreds of miles North. His city fell to ruin while he rebuilt Winterfell. His city is a wasteland.

In the wreckage, he spots a hammer. It is singed.

He leaves it behind and silently exits the city gates. He does not look back.

* * *

The Council of Lords and Ladies possess no bastards, save him. He is not sure how far his voice will carry in these trails. He has dressed the part—Brienne saw to it when she arrived at the Stormlands’ camp for she knows his family history far better than he does, and he is grateful for her council—but he is a pretender.

He knows the other men and women in the circle think it, too.

Edmure Tully looks upon him with disgust. Gendry nearly bares his teeth. He has not forgotten all the Starks’ lost at the Red Wedding, _his_ wedding.

Yara Greyjoy does not seem impressed by his sudden ascension, but she loved the Dragon Queen and his legitimization was her will. She is brutally silent.

But Robin Arryn, the Lord of the Vale, speaks without thought or consequence. As the group settles, the boy sniffs, pettily, “Smith, this is a council for Lords. The forges are elsewhere.”

“Shut your mouth, Robin. Or I’ll blacken your eyes as I did when we were children,” Arya snarls. She has arrived as quiet as night. She looks the same and entirely different as she had when they parted all those weeks ago. His traitorous heart seizes. On impulse, he almost reaches for the concealed letter from her that has warmed his hands all these weeks. She is the calm in his furious storm. She is bitter winter and will not be challenged.

Lord Arryn sinks into his chair.

She looks at him. He looks back. Theirs is a look that lingers. It does not go unnoticed.

“Arya,” Lady Sansa gently whispers, and the spell is broken. She settles beside her brother and the moment is lost when the Unsullied drag Tyrion Lannister into the pit.

* * *

After, when it is all settled, when the North is free and Jon is banished and he is still Lord Gendry Baratheon of Storm’s End, Arya finds him. She wanders into his camp like a ghost, the same ghost he had fretted over in that first notice from Davos, and his men do not notice her.

But he knows the moment she enters his tent. He rests his clenched fists at his sides and does not turn around. He feels her approach his back and shutters when she rests her flat palm against his back.

“Gendry,” she whispers.

He shakes his head, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help save your brother.”

“You voted for the Watch.” Her arms slid around his waist and she burrows her face between his shoulder blades. “You saved his life.”

“If you have come to _thank me_ ,” the implication tastes like poison on his tongue, “I don’t require it. Jon is my friend.”

She holds him tighter, “I haven’t come to thank you. You would have come to help whether or not I asked. You’re a good man.”

He rests his hand atop of her folded ones around him. He does not dare turn around. He fears what he will do if he looks at her. He is afraid of how much of himself he might lose to her, again. He would give away his beating heart if she willed it, and he needs it to rule. It cannot be hundreds of miles away with her for all eternity.

He has earned peace. He has fought for it.

“I love you,” he admits.

“I love you, too,” she replies.

He mourns her touch when she untangles her arms and leaves.

* * *

He burns her letter the next morning. He burns Davos’, too. It held her ghost as much as the other letter in her own hand.

He fought for the living. He must leave the dead behind.

Arya Stark is a dead girl walking.

* * *

Or so he thinks.

* * *

She harbors more life than he can even fathom.

* * *

It is months later when he hears from Arya Stark, again. As she had done after King's Landing, she sends him a letter. It is two words. A name.

Enclosed is a lock of black hair.

* * *

Lyarra Snow, for she was made in the North, the child of the Long Night, is born on a boat at sea. She has no lands, no titles and is perfect in every way.

* * *

She is three months old when she meets her Lord Father. She is small, like her mother, and dark-haired with blue eyes, like her father. She is a quiet baby. She prefers to be rocked, like the ocean, than to ever sit still.

Lord Gendry Baratheon kisses the child’s head and looks at her mother. He kept her letter. He does not burn it as he had done after the war. He does not ask anything of her, for she is a wild thing and, as the Lord of Storm’s End, he knows better than to tame the sea.

* * *

She returns to him every summer, sometimes with a new child in her arms. Each has the Baratheon look. Davos jokes the seed is strong.

This goes on for nearly ten years and five children.

Lyarra Snow becomes Lyarra Stark Baratheon.

Temperate Jon Stark Baratheon follows his sister.

The twins, Argella and Artos, both have the “wolf blood” from the moment they enter the world.

Little Jenny Stark Baratheon comes last. She opens her eyes and Arya Stark sees stormy grey eyes, the first of her children to possess Stark eyes. And yet, she does not see Stark grey. She sees stormy grey eyes like the rocky shores of Storm's End. She sees a grey castle filled to the brim with children and a man with greying hair that always waits on the docks for her arrival.

She clutches her child to her chest and decides, at last, to go home. And stay.

* * *

He learns to read. 

He waits on the shores with her latest letter closed in his fist. Lyarra's hand closed in his other. 

The letter says more than a name. 

And when her boat arrives just beyond the horizon, he smiles. 


End file.
